Nothing useful comes to me.

Half an hour later I’m at headquarters being logged in by security. None of the unies looks me in the eye, and after the usual checks and inventory I’m cleared for entrance wordlessly. After two corners and three different hallways I stop and wait another thirty seconds. Those guys know me, and my range, and I know they are going to wait a while before saying anything. After ten seconds there’s nothing, ditto twenty and thirty, but then, finally—right when I think I might be in the clear—they all crack up.

Even the unies know. Perfect.

Another record I’ve set: the only pulse ever to be a punch line to a stoolie.

The machine scans me in and I slink into division. Mercifully it seems fairly quiet. Everyone at dispatch is at their desks, heads bent over schedules with phones plugged in their ears. The comp facility isn’t running any tests and the windows are all dark. I’m able to breeze past the frosted glass of the admin offices—Po-Mo’s is vacant—and before I know it I’m in the locker room. It’s empty, thank God, and still smells of fresh body odor and the saline shots that pulses use to keep their eyes fresh on double shifts, so I must have just missed an outgoing crew. I suppose I was due some sort of luck today.

I pull on the handle and my locker creaks open. Taped to the inside of the door and the back panel are clippings of my more exalted accomplishments as a pulse—the award celebrating my three-year record of taking highest honors in industry-wide comps in Salt Lake City; my first at the Endurovigil Sleep-Deprivation Sit-Off; the newspaper clipping of the bust nearly a year ago that brought down Kong and Frankie Nickels—but they aren’t reassuring. They seem almost quaint, as if from a bygone era. When I finger the corner of the article about Kong turning state’s evidence against Frankie Nickels I realize that the powerful jolt of nostalgia I’m feeling is a bad sign: I’m already thinking in the past tense.

But it’s not as bad as the feeling I get when I am confronted, as usual, with the brochure of my sailboat taped, like a centerfold, to the back of my locker.

Early in our relationship, maybe a month after that day at the Frick, Charlie told me about her secret fantasy of sailingaway to someplace where no one would find her. She was having trouble getting tenure; no one was interested in her research;¹⁶ she was living in a miserable little studio in Ozone Park that she was too embarrassed ever to let me see. She wanted out. She wanted a new future, one that was wide open, one without conniving colleagues and the years of grad school debt that were heaped upon her. So powerful was her longing that she had even tried to teach herself how to sail. She couldn’t afford lessons, she told me, and she knew that probably she would never even be able to charter a boat, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to learn, and so she had spent months and months reading books and renting how-to videos from the library. She knew, in principle, how to jibe and tack and navigate without instruments. Eventually she included me in these drills, and we began quizzing each other on terminology and etiquette, technology and vexillology, you name it.